Cannes reveals 18-film line-up featuring Coppola and Haneke

General Delegate Thierry Fremaux and Festival President Pierre Lescure announce the movies in official competition for the 2017 International Cannes film festival.
AFP/Lionel Bonaventure

Eighteen films were picked to compete in the main competition at the 70th Cannes Film Festival in the south of France in May 2017. The festival received 1,800 entries. Films from 29 countries will screen at the festival in its various categories. Spread across these, nine are first feature endeavours. They also compete for the Caméra d'Or, the Golden Camera award, against first feature films in the parallel Critics' Week and Directors' Fortnight.

In Coppola's The Beguiled, Colin Farrell plays a wounded soldier who seduces all the women around him, with disastrous consequences. Haneke's Happy End, stars one of his favourite acting duos, Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Mexican Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritù, is authoring one of the festival's 70th anniversary special attractions. A virtual reality film called Flesh and Sand.

“We will present a film by Inarritù, one of the greatest film makers today. He made a film in a totally new technical way, but the film is about migrants. I’m very interested in seeing the new form of the art in cinema but also the content,” says the Cannes Film Festival's executive officer, Thierry Frémaux. “I want to know what the film makers want to say about their world, their culture, their generation, all this adds up to what a film festival is," said Frémaux after announcing the 2017 line-up.

This anniversary year includes out-of-competition documentaries. Raymond Dépardon’s 12 Jours or 12 Days, which refers to the maximum legal length of time a person can be screened in an asylum in France before being either committed or let go, and British actress and political militant Vanessa Redgrave’sfilm about migrants called Sea Sorrow, as well as 91 year-old Claude Lanzmann’s Napalm about North Korea.

The non-competitive Cannes Classics section this year will be special for the 70th anniversary, and will be composed of films which have won prizes or featured at the Festival since its origins in 1946.

The African continent is represented in the Un Certain Regard side-bar competition. Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania's Aala Kaf Ifrit or The Beauty and the Mob and Algerian Karim Moussaoui's first feature En attendant les Hirondelles or The Nature of Time will compete along with the likes of Iranian Mohammad Rasoulof's Lerd and Michel Franco's Las Hijas de Abril, April Girls and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Sanpo Suru Shinryakusha Before we Vanish.

Festival president Pierre Lescure remarked that the festival and film industry were on tenterhooks this year.

The biggest international film gathering in the world takes place in between French presidential elections which will be over on 7 May, with legislative elections slated for June.

For the sake of pure Cannes Film Festival suspense, Frémaux promises at least one or two add-ons. Possibly, he hinted, a film from China, along with the traditionally almost last-minute announcement of Golden Palm jury members. The jury chair however is already known, it's Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar.